Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler
Anne Tyleris a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published 20 novels, the best known of which are Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist, and Breathing Lessons. All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with Breathing Lessons winning the prize for 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 October 1941
CountryUnited States of America
I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things--piano-playing, typing. You're given years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising up a new human being.
It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.
It’s like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It’s still there, but the sharpest edges are .. muffled, sort of. Then, ever now and then, I lift the corner of the blanket just to check, and .. whoa! Like a knife! I’m not sure that will ever change.
And she thought what a clean, simple life she would have led if it weren't for love.
People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes,' he said. 'The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it's like missing water. Every day, you notice the person's absence more.
Bravest thing about people is how they go on loving mortal beings after finding out there's such a thing as dying.
For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.
Once your mind is caught on the right snag, there's nothing so hard about the mechanics of writing.
My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. I mean early marriage, he said. The very start of a marriage. It's like a whole new beginning. You're entirely brand-new people; you haven't made any mistakes yet. You have a new place to live and new dishes and this new kind of, like, identity, this 'we' that gets invited everywhere together now. Why, sometimes your wife will have a brand-new name, even.
How plotless real life was!
Sooner or later, even the sharpest pain became flattened.
I suspect that marriage is like parenthood: every last one of us is an amateur at it ...
Everything was leveled, there were no extremes of joy or sorrow any more but only habit, routine, ancient family names and rites and customs, slow careful old people moving cautiously around furniture that had sat in the same positions for fifty years.
We stay in the house so much because I am waiting for the telephone. I seem to be back in my teens, a period I thought I would never have to endure again: my life is spent hoping for things that only someone else can bring about.